We tell our children, “You can be anything you want to be.” We say, “A girl can be a doctor, a boy can be a nurse,” but why in the first place must this person be a boy and that person be a girl? Your infant is an infant. Your baby knows nothing of dresses and ties, of makeup and aftershave, of the contemporary social implications of pink and blue. As a newborn, your child’s potential is limitless. The world is full of possibilities that every person deserves to be able to explore freely, receiving equal respect and human dignity while maximizing happiness through individual expression.

With infant gender assignment, in a single moment your baby’s life is instantly and brutally reduced from such infinite potentials down to one concrete set of expectations and stereotypes, and any behavioral deviation from that will be severely punished—both intentionally through bigotry, and unintentionally through ignorance. That doctor (and the power structure behind him) plays a pivotal role in imposing those limits on helpless infants, without their consent, and without your informed consent as a parent. This issue deserves serious consideration by every parent, because no matter what gender identity your child ultimately adopts, infant gender assignment has effects that will last through their whole life.

The Supreme Court’s Winsdor decision last year, and its consolidation by activist judges striking down state laws on marriage, has been the cue the transgender movement has been waiting for.

After all, the “T for Transgender” in LGBT has been around for decades, custom-built into the LGBT agenda. If you think this is the end of the line, you’re kidding yourself. There is much, much more to come.

There’s no end in sight. On the surface, the transgender package, with its assortment of gender identities, to many still resembles a fringe movement, or a passing fad. So lots of folks have been duped into thinking that the purpose of it all is to grant equal rights to a minority demographic. But it’s really about changing the language, and thereby redefining us all.

If gender distinctions are erased in law, all marriage will become legally obsolete.

Indeed, “civil rights” is always a nice line. It works well to stop debate. There’s lots of emotional blackmail involved because of the social punishments (labels of “hater” or “bigot”) heaped upon anyone who might question the agenda.

So how might an elite impose “collective belief formation” upon an unwitting public? It’s about marketing, of course, injecting memes (an older term is “hype”) into public discourse in order to build opinion cascades. An interesting academic look at this is in a Stanford Law Review article by Cass Sunstein and Timur Kuran on “availability cascades.” It explains how you can take an implausible idea and make it seem plausible by raising its availability in public discourse. Once you’ve shaped public opinion through all the usual channels—Hollywood, academic, the media, and so on—then the road to public policy has been nicely paved.

Former Johns Hopkins chief psychiatrist Paul McHugh is alarmed by this movement:

You won’t hear it from those championing transgender equality, but controlled and follow-up studies reveal fundamental problems with this movement. When children who reported transgender feelings were tracked without medical or surgical treatment at both Vanderbilt University and London’s Portman Clinic, 70%-80% of them spontaneously lost those feelings. Some 25% did have persisting feelings; what differentiates those individuals remains to be discerned.

We at Johns Hopkins University—which in the 1960s was the first American medical center to venture into “sex-reassignment surgery”—launched a study in the 1970s comparing the outcomes of transgendered people who had the surgery with the outcomes of those who did not. Most of the surgically treated patients described themselves as “satisfied” by the results, but their subsequent psycho-social adjustments were no better than those who didn’t have the surgery. And so at Hopkins we stopped doing sex-reassignment surgery, since producing a “satisfied” but still troubled patient seemed an inadequate reason for surgically amputating normal organs.

It now appears that our long-ago decision was a wise one. A 2011 study at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden produced the most illuminating results yet regarding the transgendered, evidence that should give advocates pause. The long-term study—up to 30 years—followed 324 people who had sex-reassignment surgery. The study revealed that beginning about 10 years after having the surgery, the transgendered began to experience increasing mental difficulties. Most shockingly, their suicide mortality rose almost 20-fold above the comparable nontransgender population. This disturbing result has as yet no explanation but probably reflects the growing sense of isolation reported by the aging transgendered after surgery. The high suicide rate certainly challenges the surgery prescription.

More:

At the heart of the problem is confusion over the nature of the transgendered. “Sex change” is biologically impossible. People who undergo sex-reassignment surgery do not change from men to women or vice versa. Rather, they become feminized men or masculinized women. Claiming that this is civil-rights matter and encouraging surgical intervention is in reality to collaborate with and promote a mental disorder.

There are people who are sympathetic to families with kids like Jazz but worry about the rush to adopt the trans identity. They point out that long-term studies of young children with gender dysphoria have found that only about fifteen per cent continue to have this feeling as adolescents and adults. (And these studies, which relied on data from Dutch and Canadian research teams, looked only at children who were referred to a clinic for gender issues—presumably, many more kids experience gender dysphoria in some measure.) The long-term studies have also found that, when such kids grow up, they are significantly more likely to be gay or bisexual. In other words, many young kids claiming to be stuck in the wrong body may simply be trying to process their emerging homosexual desires.

Walter Meyer, a child psychiatrist and pediatric endocrinologist in Galveston, Texas, has prescribed puberty blockers and considers them worthwhile as a way to buy time for some kids. But, in an editorial that ran in Pediatrics last March, Meyer urged families not to jump to the conclusion that their fierce little tomboy of a daughter, or doll-loving son, must be transgender. “Many of the presentations in the public media . . . give the impression that a child with cross-gender behavior needs to change to the new gender or at least should be evaluated for such a change,” he wrote. “Very little information in the public domain talks about the normality of gender questioning and gender role exploration, and the rarity of an actual change.” When I called Meyer, he said, “What if people learn from the media and think, Hey, I have a five-year-old boy who wants to play with dolls, and I saw this program on TV last night. Now I see: my boy wants to be a girl! So I wanted to say in that article that, with kids, gender variance is an important issue, but it’s also a common issue. I’m saying to parents, ‘It may be hard to live with the ambiguity, but just watch and wait. Most of the time, they’re not going to want to change their gender.’ ”

Eli Coleman, a psychologist who heads the human-sexuality program at the University of Minnesota Medical School, chaired the committee that, in November, 2011, drafted the latest guidelines of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, the leading organization of doctors and other health-care workers who assist trans patients. The committee endorsed the use of puberty blockers for some children, but Coleman told me that caution was warranted: “We still don’t know the subtle or potential long-term effects on brain function or bone development. Many people recognize it’s not a benign treatment.”

Alice Dreger, the bioethicist, said, of cross-gender hormones and surgery, “These are not trivial medical interventions. You’re taking away fertility, in most cases. And how do you really know who you are before you’re sexual? No child, with gender dysphoria or not, should have to decide who they are that early in life.” She continued, “I don’t mean to offend people who are truly transgender, but maybe a kid expresses a sense of being the opposite gender because cultural signals say girls don’t shoot arrows, or play rough, or wear boxers, or whatever. I’m concerned that we’re creating feedback loops in an attempt to be sympathetic. There was a child at my son’s preschool who, at the age of three, believed he was a train. Not that he liked trains—he was a train. None of us said, ‘Yes, you’re a train.’ We’d play along, but it was clear we were humoring him. After a couple of years, he decided that what he wanted to be was an engineer.”

As with normalizing same-sex marriage, there is far more at stake in this debate than the media are willing to recognize. We know from the astonishingly successful campaign that the country has been through in the past decade that stigmatizing skepticism, objection, or opposition as bigotry is the path to triumph. Here we go again.

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106 Responses to Transgender Babies: The New Civil Rights Frontier

Come to think of it, the social convention of wearing clothes is a necessary prerequisite for the notion that an infant has no sex. I mean, if kids all went to school naked, the idea of boys claiming to be girls would be laughable.

“Once you’ve shaped public opinion through all the usual channels—Hollywood, academic, the media, and so on—then the road to public policy has been nicely paved.”

if someone were to do a study of Hollywood (movies/TV), other media from the last 25 years or say from 1990 forward you would find just what is written above a steady drumbeat of propaganda showing how sweet and nice the LGBT community is, while ignoring the realities of that lifestyle. Notice how we hardly hear or see anything about AIDS/HIV? well of course not because if you did you would see that it is once again on the rise in the community that it basically originated in, and that would not be good for meme that homosexual lifestyle is alright Jack.

“Well, we do have the example of clitoridectomy and the just as horrific extreme version of male circumcision.”
I hadn’t thought of transsexual surgery as genital mutilation, but I suppose you’re right.

“The point is that it is not necessary to foster huge gender divisions in young children.”

Which is silly. Why force the issue at all?! Kids often learn how to play by watching what their parents do. I liked to play with toy tractors and such because my dad was a farmer, for instance. No one needs to tell a child, “Billy, you are a boy. Boys play with tractors.” They pick it up on their own.

I was looking back at old childhood pics and I saw some with my sisters wearing some of my t-shirts or snowsuits. However, I’m sure mom would not have given a damn about “gender neutrality”. They were just starting out and weren’t rolling in the dough is about all the reason to pass down some clothes, irrespective of who wore it first.

That makes sense. Babies and small children could care less what they wear. Why not make use of general play clothes for the next child?

But to be intentionally concerned about “gender neutrality”. Sounds like solidly yuppie problems. Boo hoo.

“The same point exists for gender-neutral toys. They are often the kinds of toys which lead to the most creative play (like blocks, big cardboard bricks, gender-neutral legos, paints, crayons, tree houses, indoor forts made of cotton gauze, etc.)”

Yep, those sorts of things were fun. I took blocks and made forts and castles and such. My sisters (when they played with them) made doll houses. When we were drawing or coloring free handedly, I usually drew soldiers or superheroes or somesuch, and the girls drew horses and kitties.

Children, if left to their own devices, tend towards boy or girl oriented play. However the boys will also play “girl games” and the girls play “boy games” together if they find themselves with a limited number of playmates. Also, they play “gender neutral” games. I think the only time there is an “issue” is when some parent makes it an “issue”.

Kids want to play. I don’t see any reason to “make” my boy play with guns or trucks exclusively or never play with his sister or vice versa. That would be silly, just as it would be to try to make them be “gender neutral”.

It strikes me as darkly humorous that the twaddle that Ms. (I’m assuming it’s “Ms.”) Molloy was peddling is so thoroughly unscientific, from a side that often trumpets modernist atheistic science over “those old, superstitious fuddy-duddies in the Church”.
To buy in to her nonsense is to basically call biology itself bigoted — male and female is not a “social construct”, no matter how “philosophers” would like to make it out to be. No, unless and until these “scientists” can somehow abolish the XX and XY chromosome pairs, a parent could no more declare their son to be female than they could declare him to be a Orangutang, Miniature Schnauzer or Douglas Fir.